t the real
world seems to be so full of. I've never had a fair chance to show what
was in me; I've always been placed in such a false position. Now I have
no position at all, not even a false one!"

Her companion was silent for a while. Then he said: "Yes, they all seem,
authors and authoresses both, to lose sight of the fact that the
constitution of our society is more picturesque, more dramatic, more
poetical than any in the world. We can have the play of all the passions
and emotions in ordinary, innocent love-making that other peoples can
have only on the worst conditions; and yet the story-writers won't avail
themselves of the beauty that lies next to their hands. They go abroad
for impossible circumstances, or they want to bewitch ours with the
chemistry of all sorts of eccentric characters, exaggerated incentives,
morbid propensities, pathological conditions, or diseased psychology. As
I said before, I know I'm only a creature of the storyteller's fancy,
and a creature out of work at that; but I believe I was imagined in a
good moment--I'm sure _you_ were--and I should like an engagement in an
honest, wholesome situation. I think I could do creditable work in it."

"I _know_ you could," the heroine rejoined, fervently, almost tenderly,
so that it seemed to the listener there was an involuntary
_rapprochement_ of their shadowy substances on the bench where they
floated in a sitting posture. "I don't want to be greedy; I believe in
living and letting live. I think the abnormal has just as good a right
to be in the stories as the normal; but why shut the normal out
altogether? What I should like to ask the short-story writers is whether
they and their readers are so bored with themselves and the people they
know in the real world that they have no use for anything like its
average in their fiction. It's impossible for us to change--"

"I shouldn't wish _you_ to change," the hero said, so fondly that the
witness trembled for something more demonstrative.

"Thank you! But what I mean is, couldn't _they_ change a little?
Couldn't they give us another trial? They've been using the abnormal, in
some shape or other, so long that I should think they would find a hero
and heroine who simply fell in love at a dance or a dinner, or in a
house-party or at a picnic, and worked out their characters to each
other, through the natural worry and difficulty, and pleasure and
happiness, till they got married--a relief from, well,